Despite the ghastly heat of summer, it feels faintly autumnal on Russell Square, but that's only because there are so many dead leaves on the ground. It doesn't rain in London, whatever the tourists might tell you. Occasionally we get a bit of armpit sweat drizzling sickly out the sky and there's quite a lot of sticky grey cloud hanging about but mostly it's dry dry dry. The one day it rained this summer - that'll be the day that everyone remembers, convinced it rained every day. It doesn't. I live here. I know. There's a tiny new cherry blossom tree that flowered beautifully in the spring that is sadly dead, still hanging onto its dried up leaves as if for comfort. I told one of the gardeners (surely the most pathetic gardeners in the whole of London, given the sorry state of the square) to water the poor tree, on the extremely rare occasion that I actually saw a hosepipe on. Oh, he said, he'd forgotten about that one. Yes, quite, and now it is dead.
A.L. Kennedy said it much better than I can on Radio 4 this morning. Start in at 55 minutes for someone who truly understands the horror of August in London: ~ http://bbc.in/1NF7H5R